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vbtemp

2,012 karma · joined February 24, 2011

Hello, and welcome to my HN profile.

Maybe you are here to make a professional connection. If so, that's excellent. You may reach me personally at:

  vb.temp@gmail.com

C, Rust, aerospace, embedded systems, distributed systems. You hopefully get the shtick.
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vbtemp··on Female Founder Secrets: Fertility
> I think women have largely been presented a false promise by progressives

There's a lot of sneering and judgment by women, toward women who choose to be a stay at home mom and not have a career.

vbtemp··on Mindsets to Avoid as a Senior Software Developer
I completely agree. The irony for me has been how immensely helpful toolchains (PRs, awesome unit test harnesses, powerful CI systems, etc etc) actually kind of make things worse and support everyone missing the forest for the trees.

Everything has become dislocated from reality. "Issues" and "tickets" does not capture actual work to do. Unit tests and CI do not capture whether something is truly functional. Peer-reviews do not mean a given commit is stronger than otherwise... At the end of the day there's just no replacement for good judgment and experience, despite all the fancy tools that want to try to "gamify" it.

vbtemp··on Mindsets to Avoid as a Senior Software Developer
I enthusiastically believed this in the past, but then I started observing the reverse: Code reviews became gatekeeping for junior developers... In other words, junior developers were using it as opportunities to assert power (via obstruction). Of course this was idiosyncratic to the company and team.

I've become less positive toward code reviews over the years as well - the low-hanging fruit of style checking, linting, and related stuff has been automated away. Moreover, people are busy and when they do code reviews, they are mostly looking for easy stuff to pick at. What ends up getting avoided is the far more important algorithm, design and architecture reviews that really require a much bigger cognitive load.

vbtemp··on Illegal CFC emissions have stopped since scientists raised alarm
It's Normal Behavior with Chinese Characteristics
vbtemp··on Don't Offer a Free Plan
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vbtemp··on Global real interest rates and the ‘suprasecular’ decline, 1311–2018 (2020)
Have you had to pay for medical care, child care, housing, care for elderly or disabled loved ones and/or education?? How on earth can you say that inflation has remained low??? All of those have become insanely expensive and people die all the time because they can't afford them!

Just because cheap, crappy electronics and egg McMuffins don't appreciate in cost and stay crappy and cheap does NOT mean inflation is low. Anyone can play stupid games where you say inflation is low if you only pick certain goods made by robots or poor people overseas.

vbtemp··on Woman Is Sentenced to 43 Years for Criticizing Thai Monarchy
You will not find Thai people who support it, except cronies who benefit from the royal patronage network.

The lese majeste laws are simply the work of an autocratic leader and institution that positions itself above the law. Any ordinary Thai who might have been okay with these laws[1] during the reign of the last king (who did genuinely serve as a kind of emotional anchor for Thais, despite the self-enrichment of his family) certainly sees them for what they are: The frantic efforts of a demented, bizarre, spoiled boy-child to deflect criticism and cement power.

[1] Also remember, during the time of the last king, the laws were not really enforced. We all remember stories of black-out drunk Aussies pissing on a portrait of the king by a busy road getting arrested for it, but beyond those theatrical and scandalous episodes, the laws did not really affect many people until the new king took over.

vbtemp··on The richer you are, the more likely you’ll social distance, study finds
I'm sorry you are getting downvoted for wrong HN think. People come up with all sorts of weird off-the-cuff justifications for things. Medical staff, various home contractors, grocery-store staff all wear masks for extremely long shifts. HN logic seems to be: Poor people less-likely to social distance and wear masks -> HN responds with all sorts of supposed sociological factors why they don't and why it's acceptable. Meanwhile, lots of poor people (who work in the aforementioned professions) actually do wear masks and safely practice all the precautions, so the HN peanut gallery just end up being patronizingly insulting to poor people.
vbtemp··on We don't need data scientists, we need data engineers
You and me both, friend. Except I normally get down-voted to oblivion for saying the opposite.
vbtemp··on Ask HN: Are you preparing for a market crash? How?
Sure, I recommend opening a regular brokerage account with Vanguard. you can open it in 10 minutes, and it might take a few business days to transfer in the initial batch of funds.

Then once you have one of the vanguard mutual funds (let's say Target 2060), you can literally have it automatically pull from your bank account every 2 weeks and invest it straight into the fund. You'll never even have to log in after that. Bump up your monthly investment whenever you can, and over a couple years (or a decade or so) you'll end up excellent financial security and even possibly real wealth without realizing it.

vbtemp··on Ask HN: Are you preparing for a market crash? How?
You literally just strung together a bunch of meme-related buzzwords. There are serious concerns about inflation, and better ways to address those challenges than culty catechisms.
vbtemp··on Ask HN: Are you preparing for a market crash? How?
Advice I would have given my 22 year old self: Mirror with an individual brokerage account what your employer does with your 401k. Just dump $X/month into that blended target retirement index/mutual fund. It's not perfect, but it will give you reasonable exposure to a broad class of assets and will make you rich slowly while you focus on your life and career.
vbtemp··on Ask HN: Are you preparing for a market crash? How?
Wow, there are a lot of people making some very extreme and/or horribly informed commentary here.

There is no way to predict the future. In general, simply keep certain principles in mind.

1. Avoid "terminal conditions" - i.e., you lose all your money on an asset that goes bust and you have no money left to continue investing. I.e., Being 100% in Bitcoin or in your company's RSUs or options.

2. Minimize downside risk - Related to the first, avoid situations where you may incur large losses from having certain asset classes suddenly lose most of their value (e.g., having most of your money in the NASDAQ in 1999).

3. Keep some upside risk, however. Own some TLSA and Bitcoin (among others), but not too much. A small slice of your overall portfolio.

4. Have a balanced, diversified porfolio, even when it feels wrong, purchase under-performing asset classes. Typically, while reasonable people can have reasonable differences in opinion over precise allocations, one should have some commodities (Gold, silver), US equities (mix of growth and value, small and large cap), International equities (to include developing countries), as well as a mix of US and international government and corporate bonds, as well as a slice of cash. Real estate equity (home equity and or REITs should also be a part).

For that last part, especially, I frequently shill for the Schwab intelligent portfolio. You just put in your cash, and it will - in a very transparent way - allocate it to the proper asset classes and keep it balanced.

Of course, all the above assumes you have wealth already you are trying to preserve and grow. If one is just getting started, the advice above isn't reasonable, but that wasn't the topic brought up by OP.

TLDR, preparing for market crash means at all times - good and bad - keeping all my assets in proper proportion to one another, with an element of cash to be able to purchase more if any drops significantly.

vbtemp··on CO2 already emitted will warm Earth beyond climate targets, study finds
> the point being that an importing country should be held at least partially responsible for the emissions of the manufacturing country.

Ok, so Saudi Arabia is responsible for America's emissions. Russia is responsible for Europe's emissions. America is responsible for China's emissions.

But let's just keep playing word games to deflect responsibility from China and make sure it's all America's fault.

vbtemp··on CO2 already emitted will warm Earth beyond climate targets, study finds
> It's worth noting that China does 28% of the world's manufacturing, much of which is exported to developed countries.

You don't have to go to bat for china, you know. Does the fact that they have so much manufacturing make their emissions ok? If those manufacturing emissions we're instead from the US, would you make the same note?

vbtemp··on Traffic Simulator
Places where I've seen it, people who have the right of way take that to mean they get to play "traffic cop". E.g., at a 4-way stop the "extra polite" person who gets there first, instead of going through the intersection first, waits and waves the person who does not have the right of way to go through first, which makes that person (and everyone else) confused, and then causes a lot of slowdown, frustration, etc. Of course only happens in certain locales, where it's part of the local driving culture.
vbtemp··on Traffic Simulator
Things like this are cool. What I would be curious to see though, rather than setting global parameters (i.e., politeness), would be to have each agent have its own politeness score (as well as other attributes). Models like the one linked to here work as if each agent is a particle, rather than autonomous decision-maker adapting to their circumstances locked in long-term, iterated games with other anonymous drivers.

This way, agents would adapt their attributes to maximize their own local advantage, and therefore could see how large scale trends develop. I've driven in many countries and regions within countries, and it's just wild how "driving cultures" vary so much. Some places the drivers are so polite to the point it really makes things dangerous, other places the drivers are vindictive (distinct from being aggressive driver). It would be interesting to model how driving cultures emerge.

Edit: I guess the short story is I'm really curious why some places, like Bangkok driving is chaotic, dangerous, gridlocked, and no one adheres to traffic laws much or yields to pedestrians, but relatively devoid of road rage (and people will let you merge over if you need to). In DC, people carefully adhere to red lights, stop signs, pedestrians, etc but will go far, far out of their way to block you from changing lanes once they see your turn signal go on.

Also, exploring the game theoretic (probably prisoner's dilemma?) aspects of tailgating and how that seriously depends on the driving culture. When someone tailgates, the tailgatee can slow down (everyone loses), speed up or move out of the way (tailgater wins/tailgatee loses), etc. If everyone slowed down when tailgated, there would be no benefit of tailgating; if enough people give in when tailgated, that keeps rewarding the behavior. Anyway, that would be something fun to explore in one of these traffic simulations.

vbtemp··on Show HN: I made an alternative platform for professional profiles
Wasteland of white sameness? That's a funny way of saying simple and uncluttered.
vbtemp··on Show HN: I made an alternative platform for professional profiles
Yeah faces-in-circles is another one of many design tropes and fads that will soon be so dated, or look like lame Facebook knock off
vbtemp··on Show HN: I made an alternative platform for professional profiles
I'm of relatively strong opinion.. but why just not have faces-in-circles anywhere? It would feel so liberating from all the social network gimmicks out there. To me it would then feel so real and down for business, rather than have a whole status/appearance signaling sub game.
vbtemp··on Show HN: I made an alternative platform for professional profiles
Definitely beautiful and would love for something simple and clean to eat LinkedIn's lunch.

I don't have much to add in addition to everyone else except this: I am really disturbed by the common meme of faces-inside-circles. Why do we need faces? It just distracts from the content. I love the idea of being able to link former colleagues together - that's neat - but I'm very anti-face and there are any number of ways to do it that does not involve people's pictures.

Edit: Wow this got a lot of upvotes. So, I'll continue for a sec: There is so, so much conscious and unconscious judgment and game playing with pictures, I don't even know where to start. Let's leave this to be simple, clean and beautiful without the faces.

vbtemp··on Bitcoin is a disaster
And housing. But since cheap crap remains just has cheap and crappy as ever, somehow some people take that to mean inflation isn't a thing?
vbtemp··on CIA vs. Wikileaks [video]
Honest question, please don't snipe at me. Can someone please point me to significant leaks from out of china, russia, iran on wikileaks?

Edit: since it appears no one can actually answer this question with an actual answer, and only down vote and troll, I think that probably means wikileaks does not make significant leaks from the military-industrial complexes of China or Russia.

vbtemp··on Ask HN: Are we in tech-stock bubble?
> We are in a period of rapid inflation but mainstream economists and the government pretend we aren’t. It has been going on for decades but the official inflation rate is supposedly sub-2% while healthcare, education, daycare, high-quality food, housing, and all manner of highly-desirable-yet-cannot-be-easily-created assets have gone way up in price and are unreachable to even the middle class let alone the poor.

Can't agree more. Cheap, imported crap remains cheap and crappy, and everyone pretends that because TVs and egg mcmuffins remain affordable to the common man, therefore inflation is under control. Meanwhile asset prices, healthcare, housing, education (i.e., all the real, actual things important for someone's life that take up the bulk of their income) balloon in price.

vbtemp··on The CPUs of Spacecraft Computers in Space
Pretty much!
vbtemp··on Statecharts: A Visual Formalism for Complex Systems (1987) [pdf]
State machines implemented in-line with code usually end up as a mess. It's best if they are factored out, and implemented as a DSL inside a true state machine engine running as a somewhat independent service or library.
vbtemp··on Statecharts: A Visual Formalism for Complex Systems (1987) [pdf]
People who gloss over this do so at your own risk. This technique is applicable for so, so many applications - even when it doesn't appear obvious at first.

Factoring out complex control system logic into these (and related) formalisms dramatically enhances testability, substantially reduces code volume, and eliminates huge swaths of possible defects (not to mention seriously enhances formal verification and model checking). The "code" part for applications should basically be for data plumbing, and all decision-making and control logic should be factored into these.

Thanks for posting this!!

vbtemp··on A computer science study plan to become a software engineer
Software engineering needs to be learned on the job. I see lots of new grads that take classes in "Agile" and I cringe just knowing how instead they could be taking difficult courses in graph theory, theory of computation, abstract algebra, advanced algorithms, distributed systems, or any other number of advanced topics. As we get older it's easier to pick up tricks of the trade (various Git workflows, "agile", etc)... but it gets harder to sit down to do 3 hours of homework 4 days a week doing your pushdown automata or linear algebra exercises.
vbtemp··on A computer science study plan to become a software engineer
Challenges that benefit tremendously from just a bit of a dive into theory are all over the place. This has been true for me in my career as a software engineer whether I'm working at an energy company, federal research lab, tech startup, or networking services company. The key part is that it's not apparent (or apparently needed) unless you are familiar with the material.
vbtemp··on A computer science study plan to become a software engineer
It sounds like you work in an industry that doesn't strictly require frequently delving into foundational theory in CS. I do believe it would be a mistake to conclude its useless, however, as there are many other industries that do need it, and people who are not in touch with the theory probably would not be competitive in those industries.
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